Architecting Latency Sensitive Applications for the Cloud:

Cloud computing offers IT organizations the ability to create geo-distributed, and highly scalable applications while providing attractive cost-saving advantages. Yet, architecting, configuring, and adapting cloud applications to meet their stringent performance requirements is a challenge given the rich set of configuration options, shared multi-tenant nature of cloud platforms, and dynamics resulting from activities such as planned maintenance. A unique area of focus of our research is interactive multi-tier applications (e.g., enterprise applications, web applications) which have received limited attention from the community. We are developing novel methodologies, and systems that can enable application architects to (1) judiciously architect their applications across multiplecloud data-centers while considering application performance requirements, cost saving objectives, and cloud pricing schemes guided by performance and cost models of cloud components such as key-value datastores; (2) create applications that can adapt to ongoing dynamics in cloud environments through transaction reassignment over shorter time-scales. Our research if successful can enable IT organizations to significantly reduce costs by optimally moving their operations to the cloud. We are also working on creating benchmarks based on operationally deployed applications and collecting workload traces which will be made available to the research community.

Publications:

• Dealer: Application-aware Request Splitting for Interactive Cloud Applications, Mohammad Hajjat, Shankaranarayanan P N, David Maltz, Sanjay Rao and Kunwadee Sripanidkulchai, ACM CoNEXT 2012. [PDF] [PPT] [BibTex].

• Closer to the Cloud - A Case for Emulating Cloud Dynamics by Controlling the Environment, Ashiwan Sivakumar, Shankaranarayanan P N, Sanjay Rao, NSF GENI Research and Educational Experiment Workshop 2012. [PDF][PPT].

• Cloudward Bound: Planning for Beneficial Migration of Enterprise Applications to the Cloud, Mohammad Hajjat, Xin Sun, Yu-Wei Sung, Dave Maltz, Sanjay Rao, Kunwadee Sripanidkulchai and Mohit Tawarmalani, ACM SIGCOMM 2010. [PDF][PPT] [BibTex].